How Raghav Awasthi’s Desire to Jail Me Highlights RSS’ Bigotry

Revati Laul explains why it’s ridiculous of an RSS man to suggest she go to jail, that too for her secular views.

Image depicting a war of words.

(Photo: iStock/Altered by The Quint)

(This is a rejoinder to Raghav Awasthi’s rejoinder to Revati Laul’s original piece.)

It isn’t often in the career of a journalist that your political adversary suggests you be imprisoned. I have just had the full blazing glory of a member and spokesperson of the RSS draw up this glorious fantasy and it has absolutely made my day. The crime that spokesperson Raghav Awasthi says ought to put me behind bars is the alleged denial of the holocaust that Kashmiri Pandits faced at the hands of a medieval torturer – Sikandar Butshikan between 1389 and 1413.

In order, no doubt, to prevent the organisation that has made him their trusty spokesperson (the RSS) from being sullied by this suggestion, Awasthi says bravely that he is stating this in his “individual capacity and not as as a member of the RSS, that India urgently needs a law whereby Hindu holocaust deniers like Ms Laul can be sent to prison just like there is a law in the Federal Republic of Germany to deal with those who deny the Jewish Holocaust. This seems to be the only way to curb such irresponsible and semi-literate commentary.”

Of History & Historical Fiction

We do indeed live in interesting times – the term being an English translation of a Chinese curse – ‘may you live in interesting times.’ Where a man who leans on an organisation for his traction and tenacity decides that perhaps he may want to go a little further than the usual bigotry some of his co-habitors are known for, so he says he will bravely do it alone.

But I digress. You will want to know what this man is basing his accusation on. It is a column I wrote here, on a trail of historical fiction that was created by Awasthi and others like him as they swooped in to defend chef Atul Kochhar’s bigoted statement on Twitter, for which Kochhar was sacked from his job by the Marriot Hotel in Dubai.

I had said in my piece that Awasthi was twisting history to suggest that what happened in the 1400s was a genocide, repeating what historians that are experts on medieval Indian history say goes missing in such arguments.

They have painstakingly explained how temple destruction – whether at the hands of Butshikan in Kashmir or Aurangzeb or most any other medieval monarch – cannot be called a religious genocide because those were not secular times to begin with.

Every monarch was also a religious or quasi-religious head of state and to expect otherwise, is to commit historical fraud or take history as if it should behave according to the laws and ideas of the present.

Context Is Important

In this context, I had said that the Kashmiri ruler Awasthi mentioned in his TV debate to defend chef Atul Kochhar, was historical fiction. Not because he didn’t destroy temples, but when seen in the context of how most rulers at the time functioned –regardless of their religious persuasion – then they all did it for strategic reasons rather than to suppress any one faith.

Therefore, I had quoted a website called Lost Kashmir History that in my piece I prefaced with the phrase “whatever the veracity of the site…” which Awasthi in his diatribe omits as he accuses me of using dubious sources.

The question I raised in quoting the website still stands and it is this: “Even if Sikandar, in his zeal for his own religion, transgressed the limits of moderation…what happened before he was born?” The site quotes a Chinese traveller at the time – Ou-K’ong who came to Kashmir in the year 759. He had read Sanskrit texts about 300 Buddhist monasteries in the area but couldn’t find them on the ground. Were they erased, he asked.”

What I am saying via the site is that, what Sikandar Butshikan did what was probably the order of the day, as a Chinese traveller through Kashmir pointed out – who destroyed 300 Buddhist monasteries? Whatever Butshikan did, others before him did as well. Taking his actions out of context in order to paint a picture of religious persecution of the order of a genocide is to miss the wood for the trees.

Misreading History

To further put my argument in its original context, I go back to what historian Richard Eaton and many others, including Romila Thapar that Awasthi quotes, say repeatedly. In order not to twist history and make it seem like its job is to cater to present-day politics, we have to read things in their proper context. Therefore, we cannot flatten over 1,500 years of rule by Persian speakers starting roughly around the 6th century and going up to the petering out of the Mughal empire after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 as a period when India was being terrorised by Islamic invaders as chef Atul Kochhar and his defenders in the RSS suggest.

To not see the waves of different and divergent Muslim rulers as settlers is to misread history itself. If they were invaders, I argue, then so were the Aryans many thousand years before.

Or to translate that into English – Awasthi might understand better – neither were. We had waves of Persian rule and the dynasts by and large settled in India, just as the Aryan “migrants” that Awasthi refers to them as were also people who came here and settled.

The idea that there were original inhabitants in the subcontinent and settlers from the outside is a modern-day construct, first used by British colonisers and later picked up uncritically by historians the RSS love to quote and misquote to suit their present designs as they re-write history to create the fiction of a glorious and ancient Hindu culture followed by a terror-ridden medieval horror.

An Attempt to Re-write Both Law & History

The point I make is brought home vividly and pointedly by the world’s best known commentator on genocide – Professor Mahmood Mamdani. In his book on the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Mamdani says it was the coloniser’s re-writing of history that led to the creation of new political identities as polar opposites that gave rise to modern-day genocides. Mamdani writes, “the clue to Hutu and Tutsi violence…lies in…how they were constructed as political identities by the colonial state, Hutu as indigenous and Tutsi as alien.”

Mamdani further elaborates that this applies to the colonial construction of Hindu and Muslim identities in the Indian subcontinent and Sinhala and Tamils in Sri Lanka, where “the bipolar division of humanity provided the rationale for the elimination of entire peoples.”

Here he says the partition of India came from such re-writing of history. Which is why it makes sense to argue strongly against such dangerous fictions about our past. (‘When Victims Become Killers – Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda’ – Mahmood Mamdani, Princeton University Press, 2002)

With that I return to the question of my alleged misdemeanour for which Awasthi would like to see me in jail. That of not seeing what happened to Kashmiri Hindus in the 1400s as a genocide. I have explained amply and repeatedly by now that the term genocide applies to modern societies. And in that context, I have in the same piece that should in Awasthi’s reckoning take me to prison, called the flight of the Kashmiri pandits from 1989 on (I should have said 1990) a genocide in the second paragraph of the said incriminating piece.

Do send me to jail, however, in your personal or professional capacity. I would indeed like to see how this plays out Mr Awasthi, as you re-write both law and history for your own personal benefit.

(Revati Laul is an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Delhi. She tweets@revatilaul. This is a personal account. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)